Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources in order to achieve a successful completion of specific project goals and objectives. A project may be described as a finite endeavor, having specific start and completion dates undertaken, to create a unique product or service that brings about beneficial change or added value. This finite characteristic of projects sets projects apart from business operations, which may be described as permanent or semi-permanent functional work to continuously produce the same product or service. In practice, the management of both projects and business operations systems is often found to be quite different, and as such requires the development of distinct technical skills and the adoption of separate management philosophies.
The primary focus of any project management system is to achieve each of the project goals and objectives while adhering to typical project constraints, such as scope, quality, capacity, time and budget. A secondary focus would be to optimize the allocation and integration of inputs necessary to meet pre-defined objectives. A project may include a carefully defined set of activities that use resources (e.g., money, people, materials, energy, space, provisions, communication, motivation, etc.) required to achieve the project goals and objectives.
Project management is typically the function and responsibility of an individual project manager. While the project manager seldom participates directly in the activities that produce the end result, he or she strives to maintain the progress and productive interaction of various parties in such a way to reduce the overall risk of failure. A competent project manager must be able to envision the entire project from start to finish and to have the ability to ensure that the project is realized. Regardless of the type of product or service, whether it is telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing construction, computer software, financial services, the project manager may oversee the implementation of the project, as well as the operations of the project.
With large volumes of work and projects, organizations quickly become disorganized. The currently available corporate tools cannot support the level of granularity needed to effectively manage this work. There are inconsistencies in the process individuals use to create time and cost estimates, which results in estimates being so uniquely tailored that there is no rollup of data that can provide a project manager with meaningful information. The inability to accurately track critical project data creates a myriad of data integrity issues, insert/deletion anomalies, multi-user issues, data corruption, and individual field deadlocks. The end result of the inefficient tracking is inconsistent data and poor decision making abilities, which, in many cases, will lead to project mismanagement.